Acronis Success Story and 2 (simple) Questions

I bought Acronis not long ago because my system was just flakey. I finally encountered an identifiable harddrive error (Dell laptop) and Dell replaced the drive with a new one (with the factory image).

It was really nice to just boot Acronis off my CD, restore my apps and data, and there was my desktop just like before the failure - nice.

I had a video program whose copy protection had a hardware specific key (not much that Acronis can do about that), but everything else ran just fine except for Microsoft Access 2003 (Office Database). MS Access insisted on installing 'features' off the install CD before it would run. It was not a problem to resolve (just insert the CD and move on). But what is Access doing here that required this step?

Obviously I will continue to use Acronis as my primary back-up tool and I am curious as to how people manage incremental backups. I'll probably do a weekly (or more) backup. Do folks typically do a consolidate every couple of months? Or maybe start with a fresh backup quarterly?

Any thoughts on how to best manage this over time?

Thanks.

dave

 

There was an issue with TI2009 that is supposedly fixed in the last build and for the most part in the previous buld, that may be your problem.

If the image was created with file exclusions set to ignore imaging *.bak files it would cause a problem with MS office products. For some dumb reason, MS puts needed stuff in a file with a .bak extension and if it isn't found you have to reload some files from the CD.

No real hard advice on the incrementals because I only do full images of C. However, be aware that if you have a problem with any incremental in your chain, all from that one to the latest one are useless. For this reason, I would keep a chain of incrementals to be fewer rather than many.

 

It is just as quick for me to do a Full backup as to do an Incremental Backup. So I only do Full backups.

Space is not an issue with cheap large drives today.

The size of an incremental even if there are only a few changes is often on my system almost as large as a Full backup. So even the space argument for increments is on my setup not valid.

Also doing Full backups is less risk than a series of Full + Incrementals.

Finally restore time is quickest from a Full rather than a backup set of Full + incrementals.

But each person has to decide and test their own Backup protocol. They alone will know their hardware and their needs.

The only important thing is to do backups.

 

Hello DaveLeeNC,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

The issue with restoring Microsoft Office has been fixed in the latest build (9709) of Acronis True Image Home 2009. The reason of the problem is that ATI has default exclusion list when backing up in Windows (*.bak, *.~, *.tmp). After restore MS Office will ask for the installation CD because it stores some registration information in *.bak files.

Concerning backup strategies I may recommend you to look through the following video toturials.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev

 

Thanks to everyone for the helpful responses.

Dmitri, did you intend to post a link that isn't there?

dave

 

This is the video link used in other postings.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/video10/